Rutgers Labor Center Celebrates
Life & Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi

In 1948, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book called The New Men of Power, which examined the careers of post-war labor leaders who emerged from industrial union struggles in the 1930s. At the time, the author was hopeful that labor’s progressive wing—led by this new generation of trade unionists—would be a bulwark against war, militarism, and resurgent corporate power.

A decade later, Mills became a cheerleader for the emerging student movement because the “main drift” of organized labor and most of its officialdom in the 1950s was trending in a conservative direction. That was symbolized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) purge of left-wing unions representing a million workers. This paved the way for its mid-1950s merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) an alliance in which craft union influence was predominant.

One individual exception to this generational trajectory was the career of a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi. In the 1950s and 60s, Mazzocchi rose through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a union with then strong CIO traditions of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy. While Mills welcomed the revival of campus radicalism in his famous 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” mainstream unions were very hostile, then and later, to any migration of New Leftists from college campuses to unionized workplaces.

The stodgy, insular, cold warriors at AFL-CIO headquarters viewed the growing militancy of the civil rights, antiwar, Black Power, environmental, and feminist movements as a big political threat.

Only a few longtime working-class leaders welcomed Sixties’ activists into the ranks of labor. Tony Mazzocchi was one of the most influential among them. His personal mentoring enabled many former students to become more effective organizers, contract negotiators, strike leaders, and advocates for independent political action.

An Influential Mentor

In singular fashion, Mazzocchi developed a wide following outside his own union. As his biographer, labor educator Les Leopold explains, “Tony was a kindhearted soul with an earthy, self-deprecating sense of humor. Unlike so many people who rise to union leadership, he did not have an ego you constantly had to tiptoe around.” Those qualities alone made him the premier political mensch of the labor left, for four decades, until his death in 2002.

Nearly a quarter century after 2002

Nearly a quarter century later, several hundred friends, allies, and former co-workers of Mazzochi are coming together at the Rutgers University Labor Center on June 4-5, for an in-depth discussion of his life and legacy. (For schedule and registration information.) As recounted well in Leopold’s 2007 biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, Mazzocchi was both a role model and catalyst for progressive activism around multiple issues.

As an OCAW local president and regional leader in New York, legislative director in Washington, and later the union’s national secretary-treasurer, Mazzocchi managed to juggle day-to-day union responsibilities with a tireless commitment to civil rights, labor-based environmentalism, job safety reform, single-payer health care, nuclear disarmament, and union democracy. He was a leading architect of the fight for a federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1972, warranting Leopold’s description of him as “the Rachel Carson of the American workplace.”

Working Class Roots

Unlike many of his later fans who were middle-class baby boomers, Mazzocchi was shaped by his childhood experience during the Depression, followed by Army service in the Battle of the Bulge. He came from a boisterous, pro-labor Italian-American family in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood later known for its white working-class conservatism and residents with mob ties.

Mazzocchi’s two sisters and a closeted gay uncle were Communist Party (CP) members. Despite growing up in that milieu, Tony never joined the CP. As Leopold reports, Mazzocchi regarded “formal Marxism and its terminology to be too doctrinaire.” 

He was more influenced by left-wingers with a popular touch. He actively supported Congressman Vito Marcantonio’s unsuccessful 1949 campaign for N.Y.C. mayor as an American Labor Party candidate. According to Mazzocchi’s biographer, the young World War II veteran “watched and learned how Marc carefully serviced his base, while also staking out radical positions. Not only did he care for ‘workers’ as a political category — he cared for his constituents personally.”

Mazzocchi took the same approach when he got a job at a Queens cosmetics factory in 1950 and became a union activist. Local 149 at Helena Rubinstein was then affiliated with the United Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers (which merged with the Oil Workers to became OCAW five years later). As a union shop steward, organizer, and eventually president, Mazzocchi tripled his local’s size. He built a strong cadre of shop floor leaders, started a book club and credit union, and sponsored a “vast array of social activities” that “combined to create a remarkable new spirit at work.”

As Leopold recounts: “In stark contrast with much of the labor movement in the mid-1950s, Local 149 championed the rising civil rights movement — even though its membership was 95 percent white.”

War and Peace

In 1957, Mazzocchi helped launched the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) to oppose atom bomb testing. His longtime involvement with SANE put him in touch with the “leading scientists, environmentalists, and activists who would later join him building an occupational safety and health movement.”

When the Rubenstein plant relocated outside the city, Mazzocchi’s membership became a force in local politics and a reliable source of strike solidarity in the suburbs. By the mid-1960s, Mazzocchi was mobilizing against job cuts at military contractors on Long Island with a union-drafted plan “to use defense workers’ vast skills to build public buses and subway cars.”

Aided by economist and fellow SANE activist Seymour Melman, this pioneering promotion of “economic conversion” won Mazzocchi a White House audience with Lyndon Johnson in 1964. That same year, he almost ran for Congress — a move thwarted by Democratic Party officials who looked askance at his peace activities and feared they would be redbaited along with him.

Mazzocchi’s aspirations for higher office were partially fulfilled, instead, within the 200,000-member OCAW. In 1965, he helped elect a new national union president, after a bitter struggle with top OCAW officials linked to CIA meddling in foreign labor movements. This victory made Tony the union’s legislative/political director. 

Job Safety and Health

In that capacity, Mazzocchi linked emerging public concern about environmental pollution to the source of the problem — workplaces where OCAW members and other workers were exposed to toxic chemicals at much higher levels than anyone in surrounding communities. In the era before OSHA and the Environmental Protection Act (EPA), as Leopold points out: “There were no effective standards. There was no enforcement. The corporations ruled as absolute monarchs over chemical production, exposure, and regulation.”

At Mazzocchi’s initiative, organized labor began to shift its own focus, from a traditional emphasis on job safety (i.e. protection against injuries) to dealing with the long-term health effects of occupational hazards. His method involved rank-and-file consciousness raising and grassroots coalition building, outside the Beltway.

A high-school dropout himself, Mazzocchi recruited a high-powered network of medical researchers to provide documentation for lawsuits, reports, press releases, hearing testimony and investigative reporting. He regularly dispatched these allies to probe for the causes of job illnesses reported by his membership.

At the same time, he organized non-stop “road shows” that brought workers together with friendly experts and forced lawmakers to listen to both of them. Mazzocchi’s drive for passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1972 is a case study in building effective labor clout, albeit in an era when legislative gains were still possible even under a Republican president.

The Silkwood Case

In that same decade, OCAW tried to help rank-and-file whistle-blowers like Karen Silkwood in Oklahoma. She worked at a dangerous nuclear facility operated by Kerr-McGee and died under suspicious circumstances in a 1974 car crash. That occurred when Silkwood was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter–an interview arranged by  Steve Wodka, a close collaborator of Mazzzocchi’s and now a contributor to Capitol Hill Citizen. (For more on that famous case, see Meryl Streep’s moving performance in the 1983 film Silkwood.)

As an integral part of what Leopold calls “the atomic-industrial complex,” OCAW dues payers in the nuclear industry proved to be Mazzocchi’s own Achilles heel. When he decided to run for national union president in 1979 and 1981, conservative opponents — critical of his “anti-nuke” politics and “incessant boat-rocking” — mobilized against him. In both hotly contested convention elections, he suffered heartbreakingly narrow defeats.

Tony confounded his foes, per usual, by making an unexpected political comeback. In the late 1980s he reconciled with Bob Wages, the last president of OCAW before it merged with the Paper Workers and then the United Steel Workers. Mazzocchi returned to the OCAW leadership as national secretary-treasurer again. This time, he used that post to promote worker education initiatives like Les Leopold’s Labor Institute and, with far more obstacles, a new labor-based third party.

A Party for Labor?

After four years of preparatory work, the Labor Party got off to a promising start in 1996 due to growing rank-and-file disillusionment with the Clinton Administration. Its founding convention in Cleveland drew fourteen hundred delegates, including rank-and-file activists, local officers, some national union officials, and labor-oriented academics like author and historian Adolph Reed, a speaker at the Rutgers conference in early June.

During the LP’s early years, Mazzocchi helped generate much of its labor funding and support, through relentless personal barnstorming around the country. Unfortunately, dreary and divisive left sectarian squabbles soon paralyzed some chapters. A substantive disagreement about when to start running viable independent candidates—and at what level of government– was never satisfactorily resolved. 

After CHC publisher Ralph Nader, Tony’s longtime friend and ally, made his Green Party run for the presidency in 2000, the mainstream union backlash against alleged third party “spoilers” further complicated LP recruitment efforts. The authors of this piece and other “Labor for Nader” supporters did grassroots turn-out for Ralph’s famous “super-rallies” in Boston and other cities. But only two LP affiliates–the United Electrical Workers (UE) and California Nurses Association—officially endorsed his campaign, not the LP itself. 

The electoral college (and Supreme Court-assisted) victory of George Bush in 2000 and resulting Republican attacks on labor tended to drive unions back into the Democratic Party fold. Other LP sponsors, including OCAW’s new parent organization, withdrew their support. In 2007, the LP folded its tent.

As two key LP organizers, Mark Dudzic and Katherine Isaac, summed up the experience five years later: “the prospect of breaking completely with the Democratic Party without an established alternative was too risky for even the most militant unions and remains the biggest challenge to any effort to build an independent labor politics.” 

It should be noted that, even within the Democratic Party, only seven national unions, representing just a million workers, dared to embrace the pro-labor presidential primary campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the leadership choice of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and big independent unions like the National Education Association. 

Mazzocchi’s Legacy

Tony didn’t live to see it but, two years ago, former local union president and strike leader Dan Osborn proved, without a doubt, that Nebraska is one state ready for a labor-backed independent candidate. After an unexpectedly strong showing in his 2024 U.S. Senate race against a MAGA Republican incumbent, Osborn is making a second run against another one this year, as the CHC reported in its February-March issue.

From MassCOSH in Boston to Work Safe in the Bay Area, local occupational safety and health coalitions which Tony helped foster, continue to support job safety and health fights. Antiwar agitation by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) and Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities still reprise the role played by the Vietnam-era Labor for Peace, which Mazzocchi supported.

Under Tony’s influence in the 1980s, OCAW sponsored a Boston Organizing Project, which placed “salts” in non-union workplaces. The much bigger 21st century successors to that effort include the SEIU-backed Starbucks Workers United, Amazon warehouse worker organizing efforts by the Teamsters, and the Rank-and-File Project, which has a multi-industry focus and helpers from DSA and Labor Notes. 

The Labor Institute, an independent labor education and research project that Mazzocchi helped start in the mid-70s, continues to issues studies on economic inequality and provide health and safety training for unions, immigrant workers, and disaster clean-up crews.

Two key Labor Party demands—single payer health coverage and “Higher Ed for All”—the latter inspired by Mazzocchi’s own experience with the original GI Bill—didn’t gain enough traction in the 1990s. But both became a programmatic centerpiece of two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, as former California Nurses Association leader RoseAnn DeMoro will remind the Rutgers conference crowd.

As Les Leopold, also a Rutgers conference organizer, points out, Mazzocchi always raised hopes and expectations by “conjuring up a labor movement that didn’t really exist, but just might.” And that “movement would be militant and green. It would bring about radical changes that would stop global warming. It would give workers real control over the quality and pace of work and over corporate investment decisions. It would champion the fight against militarism and for peace and equality. It would win free health care. It would dare to create a new political party to counter the corporate domination of the two major parties.”

In a period of declining union density and Trump-related defensive crouches, few union leaders today project anything like this expansive vision.  The two-day event at Rutgers will begin with panels and workshops featuring speakers who worked with Tony or whose current organizing was inspired by him. It will also include a more “interactive, worker-centered, action-centered day of strategizing, learning from the lessons of the past and applying them to the present and future.”

The conference will officially unveil the Tony Mazzocchi Archive, to be permanently housed at the Rutgers Labor Center. It will feature, not just OCAW-related documents, but a wide-ranging oral history project, capturing the voices of workers influenced by the visionary leadership and pragmatic radicalism that Brother Tony personally embodied.

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